All posts tagged ‘inky’

One of the things I geek out about is creative cooking, and one of my favorite things to make in the Fall is pumpkin pancakes. Sometimes I add semisweet chocolate chips and sometimes pecans. Every once in awhile I go crazy and make them from scratch. I am always looking for new pancake recipes and even dabbled in making cinnamon apple ones. Grating the apples for that recipe took forever and my knuckles had a few injuries, but they were tasty. (The pancakes, not the knuckles!)

Recently I came across a blog entitled Jim’s Pancakes that combines geeky cooking with one of my favorite things: pancakes! Jim professes to be a dad that makes ”cool pancakes” for his daughter, but the man is a pancake artist.

I was inspired by his site to try some pancake creations of my own. I mixed up a batch of pumpkin pancakes and put the batter into a mustard bottle that you can buy anywhere. Mistake number one. The mustard bottle top was too skinny to let the batter out and it kept clogging up. So, I got out my candy bottle that I use to squeeze chocolate out of. The hole in the top is much larger and it worked perfectly. (These are available everywhere, including that giant store that starts with a Wal and ends with frustration at the long checkout line.)

Pumpkin Head Image: Jennifer D.

I started out trying to make a jack o’lantern. I squirted out eyes, nose, and mouth and then filled in the shapes. It turned out okay, but tore in several places when I was trying to take it off the griddle. One of my blobs of batter took on a shape reminiscent of Casper and I was inspired to make a ghost. That ghost turned out so so. I had to make him so small that his eyes and mouth filled in with batter. Since his eyes filled in with batter, I had the idea to use chocolate chips for the eyes which worked pretty well. So I started racking my brain for other Halloween shapes and ended up with a simple moon and another ghost. Then, I got ambitious and tried a Frankenstein. Second mistake. I was too ambitious, but the shape looked familiar. I flipped that shape upside down, added a couple of chocolate chip eyes and voila!

Clyde Image Jennifer D.

Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde! These ghost shapes were easy to make and looked so cute with the chocolate chip eyes. I quickly made three more ghosts and then did a few pancake batter dots. You could even take it a step further like Jim does and color your pancake batter. Seeing as I was working on borrowed time while my six month old slept, I opted to not color the batter and just surprised my daughter with a little PacMan scene. Being a child of the 80′s, her GeekMom has already introduced her to the amazing world of Pac-Man. My daughter got to gobble up a Pac-Man vignette for her Saturday morning breakfast and we got to spend some quality girl time giggling over pancakes.